Amsterdam

Last weekend, I met my friend Graham in Amsterdam. We used AirBNB to get a really cool little studio apartment for the weekend right on a canal in the middle of the city for pretty cheap. It's a really interesting city, the buildings all look like they are on the verge of just tipping over or collapsing.

I think we got about as much out of the weekend as possible. We arrived Friday, and just did a walk around exploring. Saturday we woke up early and went to a museum about torture after breakfast. We then tried to go to the Van Gogh museum, but it had about a 3 hour wait to get in, so we headed to do the Heineken Brewery tour instead. It was pretty cool, just a little more like a big sales pitch than a tour where you actually learn something. After that we took a canal boat tour where the tour guide made a joke in German about Americans being fat, but I've learned enough German where I could catch him. He seemed pretty impressed/surprised by that, but it was funny anyway.

We woke up early Sunday morning to go to the Van Gogh Museum and spent a couple of hours there before lunch and heading to the airport.

Pictures:

Salzburg

Saturday, I made a trip to Salzburg to do a couple of tours around the city and the surrounding area. I was able to see Mozart's birth house and the house he lived much of his adult life in, and then some beautiful little villages in the surrounding area, set in the mountains next to lakes.

I was able to get to Salzburg and back to Munich with one ticket, called a Bayern-ticket, that also allowed me to use public transportation in Salzburg, and only cost 23 Euros. Also very interesting was that I crossed the German-Austrian border twice and my passport was not checked. I'm not sure what to think of this, especially since I was travelling the day after the events in Paris, but nonetheless, it made my trip very easy and convenient. I learned a great deal about the history of Salzburg during my trip. 

The best part of my trip was definitely the views I got to see.. much different than Mississippi:

Day trip to Mittenwald

This past Monday my fluids class was canceled, so I decided to take a day trip to Mittenwald, a little mountain town in the very south of Bavaria. It was about a two hour train ride with a great view the whole way. While I was there I explored the town, hiked a mountain trail, and had a dinner of Ox steak at the Mittenwald Brauhaus. Here are some pictures I took:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MUAS Classes

I've spent the last couple of weeks getting acclimated to the university system over here. It's quite different, but I like it. All the professors at my school are required to have at least 5 years of practical experience in their field, which I think is a great idea. In some of my classes I'm the only native English speaker; the German students take these classes in English to improve their job prospects internationally. Sometimes the professor will ask me how we approach a certain subject differently in the US, and it can be pretty interesting for me and the other students seeing the differences.

A big difference here is the way you receive your grade. There are essentially no required assignments during the semester, so your whole grade is based on the exam at the end. This obviously has its benefits and drawbacks. I really have to take responsibility for studying, since I won't be walked through the content of the course with intermittent exams and homework assignments. I think this is certainly useful for teaching students to be accountable for their own learning, but having results rest on the weight of one test is a bit scary. Luckily, none of my classes seem overly difficult at this point, so I think I will be fine.

I'd say my favorite class is Plant Engineering. Much of it applies directly to the kind of work I've done during my internships at Paper Mills. We learn about things like flow through pipes, sizing pumps, determining proper materials for design, control loops in a process, and the overall design of a process. It's a really good fluids review for me, and I've been learning a lot about material stress and wear, which we don't focus much on at MSU. It also helps to learn the international terms for everything, as these are sometimes quite different than what we use in the States. If I ever have the opportunity to work internationally, this will facilitate the transition.

Another plus to University over here is the amount of money I spent on books: 3 Euros.

Oktoberfest and Class Registration

Oktoberfest is the biggest folk festival in the world. As soon as it started, the city got crowded with people wearing lederhosen and dindle. It's a very exciting time to be in Munich.

The festival is extremely crowded. To get into one of the big "tents" (they're really just massive buildings) you have to arrive before noon, and if you leave your spot it's gone. You can only buy beer in a Maß, a liter, and it comes at around 6-8% alcohol, since the breweries make their best beer for the Oktoberfest. The festival is a lot of fun, but honestly it's probably the hardest place in Munich to get a beer.

On a completely separate subject, I was able to register for classes and I start this Monday. My schedule looks as follows:

Monday: Advanced Fluid mechanics 11:45 to 2 pm

Tuesday: technical writing 1:30-4:45
                 German 5-8:15
Wednesday: plant engineering 1:30-3

Thursday: plant engineering 8:15-945


No class on Friday so lots of good weekend trips.

Wales

A day after my friend Graham arrived in Wales, I arrived in Wales. We decided it was really helpful to have a friend from home to explore a new city with.

He is attending a University in Swansea to study accounting for a year. It's an interesting little town on the bay.

I flew into London and took a three hour train ride to Swansea. I've never been to the UK so it was pretty exciting to see so much of the countryside and cities during the train trip.

We spent most of our time getting to know his new flat mates. There are 7 of them living together, and it's a good group. They are in their first or second year at the university, so I think by the end of it, they'll all be good friends.

The best part of the trip for me was a trip to the Mumbles, just south of Swansea. We toured a castle ruin, and hiked our way to a lighthouse at the tip of a little peninsula. The weather was perfect for my whole trip, which I was told is rare.

Munich Food and Beer Tour

I haven't been able to post in a while, so I'm going to catch up with a few posts for the last couple of weeks. I'll try to keep it chronological.

Before my friend Graham left for Wales, we took a 4 hour food and beer tour through Munich. It was about 30 Euros and included beer and food for the tour... Completely worth it.

Our tour guide was an Australian guy who'd lived in Munich for 8 years. If you could pick anybody on Earth to lead a beer tour, this is your man. He was great at his job-- very funny and enthusiastic about it. The other people on the tour were from England, Georgia, and Alabama, so it was nice to talk with other southerners for a while.

We went through some of the older beer halls and a brewery museum, and eventually stopped to eat some traditional Bavarian food... "traditional Bavarian" might be the most used phrase in Munich. It was mostly meats and cheeses, of course the white sausages, which were pretty good. We ended at the famous Hofbrauhaus near the city center-- an old Nazi hangout where Hitler gave some speeches. Our tour guide left us here and we had a few beers with the other tourists.

The most interesting thing we learned from the tour was about the laws in Munich about beer. They still consider beer a food (liquid bread) so it's legal to drink beer just about anywhere at anytime. After the 1972 Olympics Munich got rid of public restrooms, which obviously becomes a problem when you have a bunch of beer drinkers roaming the city. Their solution was to deem any place that serves beer a public restroom, so you can just walk in a bar or restaurant to use the restroom, and walk out without buying something. Extremely useful information for someone with as small a bladder as mine.

They also were some of the earliest developers of refrigerating machines. It was not because they wanted to keep food fresh longer, but because it would allow them to brew beer all year long without having to buy expensive chunks of ice.


It's quite nice living in a city full of beer-lovers.